Friday, August 05, 2011

Announcement from The Undercurrent

From the staff at the Undercurrent:

Dear Potential Supporter,

In his lecture at this summer’s Objectivist conference, Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, reflected on the first 50 years of the Objectivist movement. During that session, Dr. Brook stated that if we are to succeed in changing the culture, "we need more than an Institute: we need a movement."

We at The Undercurrent wholeheartedly agree, and we think a key part of the Objectivist movement needs to be a student movement. For the upcoming academic year, we're planning a number of programs designed to spark an Objectivist student movement on college campuses. To make these programs possible, we're asking for your support.

Foremost among our 2011-2012 programs is an event called "Capitalism Awareness Week." This week-long event will consist of a series of lectures and discussions at different college campuses across the country. Each lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet so students elsewhere may participate.

This event follows in the footsteps of last Spring's virtual campus lecture, "Ideas Matter: Ayn Rand's Message to Today's World", which was broadcast to 20 other campuses live and attained a student audience of just over 600. (If you haven't seen it, that lecture is available to view here: http://bit.ly/aynrandideas.)

For this and other programs, we're seeking to raise $40,000 for the upcoming academic year. I hope you can help us as we fight to change the culture.

For more information on our plans for the year, I invite you to browse through our donor package. And if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

1 Comments:

The idea behind the undercurrent's lecture is a good one but with titles like "Capitalism Awareness Week" you are weeding out a lot of potential students who already have a bias against Capitalism (there's quite a few out there) and not reaching anyone new,just those who already agree that Capitalism is a good thing. (That's ok if your objective is to reach those who are already in favor of capitalism to give them the tools in defending it and talking to their peers about it).

This reminded me of something that I read in "Made to Stick":

A journalism teacher had students write a lead to the following facts, "Ken Peters, principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced that the entire faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead,... etc"

Most students rearranged those facts into a basic AP one-sentence headlines, "Beverly Hills Faculty invited to Colloquium next week", "Teachers Honored with Invitation to Colloquium", etc.

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Ideas cannot be fought except bymeans of better ideas. The battleconsists not of opposing, but ofexposing; not of denouncing but of disproving; not of evading,but of boldly proclaiming a full,consistent and radical alternative.
-- Ayn Rand